November 2009 Archives

There's a whole collection of these, and each repeat the same idea of fortication:
although often using the same techniques of defence, the fortifications are always an imprint or offset of the existing boundary of the town. When they ecompass another area and grow, they often preserve some idea of the previous boundary.
This reminds me greatly of the process of cell multiplication where each new cell, carries information from the previous.
An idea that I find quite interesting in the context of preservation and the passing on of information to future generations which is never a clear process.

The following images are fortifications of Strabourg (France), Mons (France), and of Pignerol (Italy)

The Archive is ment to generate 20,000 jobs, a detail which cannot be ignored at this scale. Here is look at how the surrounding towns could host such a demographic explosion.
By additionning the number of existing inhabitants (just under 10,000), it seems that it is necessary to expand there boundaries by twice there size.
I'm interested in the continuing issue of archiving an old town, preserving it from the new, creating a boundary within a boundary, and what happens when these inevitably meet.

Based on the addition of the the top 10 largest National Libraries in the world, I came to the conclusion that the New archive of Humanity should:
- cover an area of 2 million square meters
- be built to contain 200 million books (this is only the unit by which we measure the scale of the archive, not the only type of object contained within the archive)
- be powered by a work force of 20 thousand employees, hence suggest the development of a neighbourhood around the archive.

If the center of this conglomerate is the Walled town of Neuf-Brisach in North-Eastern, the archive sprawls out into the French countryside.

Of course this is very diagramatic and I am currently looking at the possibilies of expanding new fortification based on the existing boundaries around the town.

All that follows obviously needs to be edited and put into diagramatical order. But here's just some food for thought

CLASSIFICATION
"A classification is a spatial, temporal segmentation of the world. A classifiaction system is a set of boxes, metaphorical or literal, into which things can be put to then do some kind of work -bureaucratic or knowledge production. In an abstract, ideal sense of classification system exhibits the following properties:
-There are consistent, unique classificatory principles in operation.
-The categories are mutually exclusive.
-The system is complete"
Geoffrey C. Bowker, Susan Leigh Star

CODE
A set of rules for converting information into another from or representation
1. society: language and scripts such as the alphabet are regarded as code systems
2. biology: the unique genetic code or genome of a human being
3. computer science: the source code, the code of computer programs readable by humans
4. cryptography: the practice and study of hidden information; a cryptographic system using a codebook that converts words or phrases into codeworks

INTELLIGENCE
Measure carried out in government or military operations to acquire information. National secret services are specialized in gathering intelligence. The value does not lie in the details and preciseness of this information but in its assessment regarding relevance and circulation. Four important disciplines are distinguished when gathering intelligence, the so-called 'Ints':
-Humint: Human Intelligence, gaining information from human sources
-Sigint (Signals Intelligence), gaining information through the analysis of signals
-Imint (Imagery Intelligence), gaining information through any kind of image recording
-Masint (Measures and Signatures Intelligence), gaining information through space-based or airborn sensing devices

INTERNATIONAL ORGANISATION FOR STANDARDIZATION (ISO)
Association of national standardization committees from more than 157 states. The purpose is to advance standards in the world in order to develop the international exchange of goods and services as well as scientific, technological and economic cooperation.

LEIBNIZ
"A kind of general algebra in which all truths of reason would be reduced to a kind of calculus. At the same time, this would be a kind of universal language or writing, though infinitely different from all such languages which have thus so far been proposed.

LIBRARY CLASSIFICATION
A system for coding and organizing library material according to topics. The thematic fields are usually organized in an hierarchical tree structure. Each work belongs to only one category, so that each book can only be assigned "one" physical location in the library
The poet and librarian of the Library of Alexandria , Callimachus, drew up one of the first library classifications with his Pinakes Index
The two most frequently used library classifications in the Anglo-American countries today are the Dewey Decimal Classifiaction (DDC) and the Library of Congress Classification (LCC)

.DDC: The first edition of the DDC was published in 1876, when libraries started opening their gates to the broader public

.LCC: Created in 1897, is mainly tailored to the requirements of the Library of Congress. It is a set of instructions to find the books stored there and never had the intention of classifying the entire knowledge of the world

.UDC: Universal Decimal Classification based on the classification originally conceived by Leibniz. It was created at the end of the 19th century by the Belgians Paul Otlet and Henri La Fontaine as the European version of the DDC

.CLC: Chinese  Library Classification. The fact that politics also exerts an influence on library classifications can be seen here with "Marxism, Leninism and Maoism" as the first main categories.

The library Hotel in New York (USA) offers its guests more than 6,000 books that are distributed accross the ten floors of the hotel according to the topics of the DDC. The fifth floor is corespondingly dedicated to the "500 sciences" category. In these rooms one can respectively find books of one of the subcategories such as mathematics or botany.

DICTIONARY

Alphabetical list of words and their meanings as well as linguistic information or translations. Visual dictionaries offer detailed illustrations to explain the terms. In dictionary research, called lexicography, the term dictionary is used as a generic term for all kinds of reference books structured according to key-words. The most famous reference book of the 18th century is called Encyclopédie as well as "rational dictionary".

ENCYCLOPAEDIA

"short-term trends should not necessarily be given excessive space. In this context, relevance can also be understood as follows: From the viewpoint of a classical encyclopaedia, an article on Konrad Adenauer, Mozart or Albert Einstein, for example, deserves to be longer and more comprehensive than one on, say, Britney Spears.

ENCYCLOPEDIA BRITANNICA

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF LIFE
The aim is to record all 1.8 million known species on Earth by 2017. 100 million dollar project. It is to offer the opportunity of recognizing large scale patterns in biodiversitywhich specialized scientists frequently fail to notice in their narrow fields of research. A further aim is to enhance the documentation of connections between chan-ges in animal and plant populations and the climate. A further similarity is that here, too, the amount of knowledge that can be collected appears limitless. Nobody knows exactly how many animal and plant species actually exist on Earth. The long-term objective of EOL is to identify new, as yet unknown species.

ENCYCLOPEDIE

French reference book in 17 volumes of text and 11 volumes of plates published between 1751 and 1772. They structured the volums according to the figuratives system of human knowledge, a knowledge tree depicting the way knowledge is organized. The three main branches of the tree of knowledge are memory, reason and imagination. Science and religion are clearly seperated areas of knowledge.

GENOME
The complete set of genes of an organism and thus the entire hereditary information of a cell, in the form of desoxyribonucleic acid (DNA).
There are now companies that offer private DNA tests via the Internet, among others the U.S biotech startuo 23andMe Inc, in which Google has also invested. The company's name refers to the 23 pairs of chromosomes a human has. Anyone can order a detailed DNA analysis from 23andMe by sending a saliva sample. After four weeks one receives access to a genetally comprehensible analysis of one's genetic make-up on the company's website. It reveals degrees of relationships and, in the future, the analysis of one's own risk of disease.

GOOGLE
Today Google is the most often used search engine in the world. It's success is owed to the PageRank technology that evaluates pages according to the number of links from the World Wide Web reffering to them. Revenue is also generated by various advertising concepts attached to all Google applications. Over the years, Google has expanded its free service to a complex knowledge tree. Google's most recent developments Have been in the field of collecting, storing and managing medical datasets. In Google Health any user can create his or her own personalised, digital medical file online. The tests were conducted with the medical files of 1,000 volunters at the Cleveland Clinic in the United States. Google most successfull product until now is the search engine of the same name which is meanwhile available in 117 languages including Zulu and Latin. All search requests are stored for 18 months

HUMAN GENOME PROJECT
An international research project, coordinated by the US Department of Energy and the National Institutes of Health. Project goals were to indentify all the genes in human DNA, and to determine the sequences of the 3 billion chemical base pairs that make up human DNA. More than 1,000 scientists throughout the world participated in this research project that began in 1990. In 2001 the goal had been achieved with the complete sequencing of the human genome.

INDEX
Or reference list, a tabular list of important units, often words, of a text with associated pointers, referring to their location in the text document. In a traditional book index the words are selected by the author in regard to his concept marked with page numbers

INFOPLEASE
The world's largest free reference site. In addition to an online encyclopaedia it also offers a dictionnary, an atlas of the world and an almanac. The site belongs to Pearson plc., an English media conglomerate and the largest publisher in the UK;

INTERNET ARCHIVE
An American non-profit organization dedicated to the long-term archiving of digital data. At present up to 85 billion websites in their various versions are stored

ISOTYPE (INTERNATIONAL SYSTEM OF TYPOGRAPHIC PICTURE EDUCATION)
A universal pictogram language developed in Vienna in the 1920s

1. religion: The Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil was a tree in the Garden of Eden in the Bible's story of Paradise (Adam and Eve)

2. science: The form of a tree with its many branches is used in representation of the evolution and to visualize complex knowledge. The tree structure with roots as the starting point and the endless possiblilities of ramification allow a natural and easily comprehensible representation of complex hierarchies.

1. World Data Center for Climate, Hamburg: 340 terabytes of archive data

2. National Energy Research Scirntific Computing Center, Oakland, USA: 2.8 petabytes of data operated by 2000 computational scientist

3. AT&T, San Antonio, USA: 323 terabytes of information, 1.9 trillion phone call records

4. Google, Mountain View, USA: 91 million search requests per day, accounts for 50% of all internet searches, virtual profiles of countless number of users

5. Sprint Nextel, Overland Park (USA): 2.85 trillion database rows, 365 million call details records processed per day, 70,000 call detail record insertions per second.

6. ChoicePoint, Alpharetta, USA: 250 terabytes of personal data, information on 250 people

7. YouTube, San Bruno, USA: 100 million videos watched per day, 65,000 videos added each day, 60% of all videos watched online, at least 45 terabytes of videos

8. Amazon, Seattle, USA: 59 million active customers, more than 42 terabytes of data

9. Central Intelligence Agency, Langley, USA: 100 Freedom of Information Act-items added each month, comprehensive statistics on 266 countries, unknown number of classified information

10. Library of Congress, Washington DC, USA: 130 million items (books, photographs, maps, etc.), 10,000 new items added each day, 5 million digital documents, 20 terabytes of text data

DATABASE DEFINITION
A comprehensive collection of related data organized for convenient access, generally in a computer. The most common database models in use are the relational, hierarchical and the network model.

DATA DEFINITION
Logically grouped units of information that are transferred between systems or stored in systems. In computer science and data processing, data are digital representations of information that can be read and processed by a machine. The information is first coded in signs, the structures of which are subject to strict rules. To gain useful information from data, they must be interpreted in a meaningful context. This process is called data mining.